Image and video capabilities may be incorporated into a wide range of devices such as, for example, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, digital recording devices, gaming consoles and the like. Operating on video data, however, may be very computationally intensive because of the large amounts of data that need to be constantly moved around. This normally requires systems with powerful processors, hardware accelerators, and/or substantial memory, particularly when video encoding is required. Such systems may typically use large amounts of power, which may make them less than suitable for certain applications, such as mobile applications.
Due to the ever growing demand for image and video capabilities, there is a need for power-efficient, high-performance multimedia processors that may be used in a wide range of applications, including mobile applications. Such multimedia processors may support multiple operations including audio processing, image sensor processing, video recording, media playback, graphics, three-dimensional (3D) gaming, and/or other similar operations. Some of those operations may utilize complex software applications and/or algorithms that need to be compatible with the type of data intensive calculations performed by such multimedia processors.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.